The Brain That Changes Itself

For centuries, scientists treated the adult brain as a fixed machine, with each region assigned a job it would do until it wore out. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, sets out to show how that belief collapsed. His subject is neuroplasticity, the discovery that the brain can reorganize its own structure and function in response to experience, injury and training.

Doidge travelled to meet the researchers who pioneered this work and the patients whose lives it changed. Many of these people had been told their limitations were permanent, whether from brain damage, trauma, or a lifelong disorder. Among the cases he describes are a woman born with half a brain whose remaining half rewired itself to do the work of both, blind people who learned to perceive visually, and stroke patients who regained speech. Other accounts follow children with cerebral palsy who gained smoother movement, people with learning disorders who improved, and older adults whose aging minds were revitalized. Some of the people he meets overcame depression and anxiety, and some saw deep-seated character traits change.

The stories also lead Doidge into wider questions about how the brain shapes and is shaped by the body, emotion, love, sex, culture and education. The result is a hopeful, human-centered tour of modern brain science that changes how a reader might think about the mind, human nature and what people are capable of becoming.